Railway lines are known to be formed from a plurality of consecutive track portions of considerable length, along which suitable railway switches, commonly known as points, are disposed in order to connect together two or more separate pairs of rails.
The maintenance of railway lines is also known to comprise the replacement of damaged or excessively worn track portions and switches.
The switches and track portions are replaced by withdrawing the complete element to be replaced, and installing a corresponding new element.
It is apparent that the complexity of such operations requires considerable use of labour and equipment, together with extremely long replacement times, resulting in very high costs.
In order to carry out the aforesaid operations, large machines have been proposed having a length practically equal to the length of the railway line elements, their use in this field being however limited by the drawbacks briefly described hereinafter.
A first drawback of the known machines is that they are hardly suitable for handling elements of different configurations and sizes such as railway track portions and complete switches, these latter having very large overall widths which differ one from the other.
Besides being bulky and of poor versatility, known machines are excessively complicated, heavy and costly.